Archive for May, 2012

This video has been all over the atheist/liberal blogosphere in the last few days. It’s a peach. We all by now have heard about Pastor Charles “Create a Rainbow Zoo” Worley. If you missed it, here is the good Pastor showing the love:

The depth of ignorance in that clip is astounding. It’s not just that gays shouldn’t be allowed to marry- it appears that to at least some Christians don’t think gays should be treated as human beings. If you are a Christian, and you wonder why people assume that your stand on gay marriage is an extension of hateful bigotry- thank good Christian folk like Pastor Charles “At least I said we would feed them” Worley.

I don’t want to argue against people like Pastor “Weed n’ Feed” Worley. It’s too easy. It’s like shooting Christians in an electric enclosure after dropping Pineapple Ham for dinner. If they aren’t injured, they are lethargic. It’s just not fair. Besides, most Christians don’t see themselves when they watch Pastor “Stop letting them reproduce” Worley. Of the few that do, most would giggle under their breath and say “That’s wrong….funny…but wrong.”

For Gays, It Get’s Better…..for Christians, It Get’s Worse

So later, when one of Pastor “Auschlisp” Worley’s flock agreed to appear on Anderson Cooper 360 to defend her pastor, I was both thankful and hopeful that someone was going to clear the air and explain that her Pastor just got too little sleep that night, or got drunk on rhetoric- maybe had too much crack with his rent-boy- some reasonable excuse for being a gigantic class “A” asshole.

The interview was a clusterfuck. A clusterfuck on top of a disaster. A clusterfuck on top of a disaster drenched in WTF sauce. It could have been worse….but that would have taken divine intervention. Unless you’re living off the grid waiting for the pending apocalypse, you have probably witnessed the train wreck for yourself.

Judge not lest ye be judged for yourself:

There are times you deeply and genuinely disagree with someone- yet feel totally sorry for them. I feel sorry for this lady. I want to jump in front the camera and save her. This lady is somehow managing to make matters worse.

Starting a conversation with “Yes, he said that- but you people are going to repeat verbatim what he said- and that’s not fair.” is a really bad starting point. Trying to rephrase it as “Can’t we just drop this? We all know that a Free range Fag Fence is just not economically feasible- it’s never going to happen. End of discussion.” is even worse.

Then it really goes downhill. Someone was probably going to bring up the “They Can’t Reproduce” line from the sermon….but I didn’t think it would be Stacey “Stop being so literal unless we’re talking about the Bible” Pritchard. I assume that Stacey and the good Pastor think queers occasionally have straight sex in order to promulgate the species. Straight sex, of course, that we must put an end to by putting them in sex specific cages.

“We Keep Talking About Cages- That’s Not What This Is About”

I want to jump in front of the camera and explain it how it really is:

The Pastor got out of hand, he is human. An asshole of a human, more like quasi-sub-human but human none the less. I think we can all agree that he’s a fantastically bigoted hateful prick. Sometimes, guys like him can’t help but let that spill over into their job. I mean, have you ever gone to The Gap? Those guys are total fuckwads. It’s like they only hire people who tell them to f*ck off during the interview. Only like 1 in 5 pastors is that big a dick- so really, it speaks to God’s power to transform the heart.

We can all agree that gays shouldn’t be put in cages. I believe this because I know it to be horribly wrong, Pastor Worley believes it because he understands that Big Government spending is morally wrong- and cages don’t come free. Not to mention the cost of feeding them.

So really, he was out of line. Some Christians can’t apologize for this because they feel that conceding that gays shouldn’t be caged is like saying that they totally love the gay lifestyle. Either you put them in Gitmo or you start carrying a man-purse and shopping at Bed, Bath, and Beyond. There is no middle ground for these people.

The question people keep asking is whether this is Jesus-like. WWJD? as they pretentiously use for shorthand. Well, I’ll tell you what: Jesus talked all the time in parables. The parable of the prodigal son. The parable of the good Samaritan. This is just like that! For example, there was no literal “good Samaritan”- those guys were total fucking pricks. It’s a story to get a point across.Think of it like the parable of the mustard seed- except instead of a mustard seed, it’s a giant electrified fence and instead of tending to it till it is a tree- we drop food on them till they die. See? The Kingdom is not literally a mustard seed, and there won’t literally be an electrified fence. But if you tend the “seed”, it becomes a big tree and bears a reward. If you keep feeding the homos behind the fence- and maybe let them watch old Judy Garland films or have Ani DiFranco concerts or something- then we can all feel better about being hateful bigots. Jesus couldn’t have explained it better.

This is really not how most Christians think. I hope not.

Yet this is what “othering” allows us to do to minority groups. It allows us to take them as “almost equal” and insert a giant fucking electrified fence between “almost” and “equal”.

Christians keep harping on about “redefining marriage” and how traditional marriage is some magical sacred institution that is so perfect that we dare not change a single thing about it. They talk about the sanctity of the institution of marriage and how to change course now is to destroy the very fabric of our society.

How great is “Traditional Marriage™”, really?

When my wife and I decided- after five years of dating, four years of cohabitation, two children, and several family functions-to get married, I had to ask my wife’s father for her hand in marriage. She didn’t need to ask my father- or my mother-no…. I needed to ask her father. It is Tradition™, after all.

Why?

Because “traditionally“, daughters were the property of their fathers. “Traditionally“- women are property that gets transferred from man to man. “Traditionally“, I own my wife.

You know what?

F-U-C-K tradition.

I, like any reasonable and loving human being- like anyone deserving of being married- define marriage as a partnership of equals. I don’t own my wife. She is an amazing, strong, passionate human being- not an iPod. That’s not what Tradition says. That’s not what thousands of years of law and convention says. That is just a fact- and an inconvenient one if you happen to think that marriage was perfect until we started to meddle with it. I don’t want to “redefine” marriage. It continues to change with a society that has realized how traditional doesn’t mean the same thing as optimal. It is evolving to mean what it should have meant from inception- the joining of two equals in a promise of love and commitment. Did I just “redefine” marriage?

I already “redefined” marriage when I chose to view and treat my wife as a human being as opposed to a commodity that I could acquire from her father. I redefined marriage when I chose to value her as my equal.

When I asked her father for his blessing, I was following tradition. Would it have been rude to refuse to take part in a ritual subjugation of my future wife? I don’t think so.

“Traditional” doesn’t mean “right”.

Just because we’ve always done it that way doesn’t mean we can’t do it better. We can do a whole lot better than “Traditional Marriage”- so stop acting like it’s so Goddamned important.

My Daily Reads….

Christian Friends of This Blog

Julie Ferwerda-A Personal Friend and Universalist Dan Trabue-Through The Woods- Dan is an Anabaptist, and a great guy. John Barron Jr.- Truth In Religion And Politics-I disagree with almost everything he says. But he argues for it reasonably.